


Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy

by Iggy_Popsicle



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Abusive Past, Angst, Brotherhood of Steel - Freeform, F/M, Fluff, Romance, Wholesome, are we gonna find shaun, danse is wholesome, el cheats, el really likes the military, idk how to use these tags, its mostly backstory, shes not a great person tbh but i love her, tw: alcoholism, uhhh its fallout there is obvi a lot of violence, who knows - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 07:06:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19662286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iggy_Popsicle/pseuds/Iggy_Popsicle
Summary: Things were good. Just Elvira and Cait against the Commonwealth. They had been on so many adventures. Saving synthetic PI's, blowing deathclaws to pieces, bashing raider camps to pulp. Elvira has settled well and Cait was at the peak of her life. But nothing stays perfect for long and answering a distress call from Cambridge Police station sends ripples into their little pond.





	Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy

She shivered. Her muscles twitched to life after many years of preservation. It was cold. Cold like the winter when the bus broke down and she had to walk home. The chilling wind cut through her black pea coat, bringing goosebumps to rise under the layers of cotton sleeves and wool overcoat. But it wasn’t like that cold. It was a different kind of cold. A cold that made her muscles stiff and her face feel stuck. Frozen. It was a cold she had never felt before. Her body was solid but her mind was waking. Dreaming and drifting closer to reality. 

Elvira Martin jerked awake, gasping and coughing, sputtering to life like a boat that was long forgotten on a lake. She crumpled out of the decompressed pod, crashing suddenly like a wave against the sand. Her stomach felt sick. Her knees ached and popped as she stood up again. 

She should have been frantic. She should have been more frightened. But she wasn’t. Elvira approached the pod directly across from her and calmly opened it. She pulled the wedding ring off of her dead husband’s finger, trying her best to ignore his splattered brains across the back of the white, now stained, cushions. His body was still stiff. She closed the pod again. “I’m sorry,” she coughed out, a well manicured hand pressing against the window. 

The walls were cold. Not like a winter, not like a mountain, cold like sleeping on the couch after a fight. Except, every night would be like sleeping on the couch after a fight now. It would be cold and empty, like the steel walls of the vault stare back at her. Streaks followed her fingertips as she traced the lines of the wall as she walked, her feet moving without her thinking. One in front of the other. One in front of the other. 

The air felt strange. Staticy. She was folding a freshly washed blanket. She forgot a dryer sheet. Nate stood on the other end and met her in the middle. Their finger’s barely grazed, that’s all they ever did, and electricity jumped, sending a zap to the both of them. It hurt. A lot. It shouldn’t hurt that bad. 

They dropped the blanket. El looked up and instead of meeting Nate's eyes she saw two giant Tesla rods stuck out of a reactor. She was hovering just a little too close. She walked around, returning to the safety of the railed siding. Supposed safety. Something bit her legs. It hissed. Elvira couldn’t see it. She jumped, stomping frantically around where the bite came from. There was a crunch and her foot sank into something sticky and wet. Her eyes came into focus to see her foot sunken into a giant cockroach. She jerked back. Something was wrong. This was wrong. This wasn’t normal. She darted down the hall, running and hearing only the sound of her own pounding legs. 

They were on the walls. They were crawling over the floor. They were everywhere. Cockroaches the size of cats. Her heart pounded as she ran past them. They nipped her heels and stung her legs. She slammed the sliding door shut into a room with a computer. Elvira’s chest heaved as she gasped for breath. The sprint wasn’t that far but she couldn’t remember a time that she had run harder. 

What was happening? She hadn’t noticed yet, but there was a perfectly white skeleton on the floor stretched towards the terminal. Elvira walked over, pulling on the pair of glasses sitting by the screen and opening the door with the computer. Stepping back, she hit something with her heel, something that rattled across the floor.

She knelt down by the body, bones, and examined them, looking them over like she knew what she was doing. But she didn’t. They just looked like an all too real Halloween decoration, or something she had seen on movies. It was someone’s skeleton. Her hand hovered over the white. The hue of her skin was dangerously close to the same as the bones on the floor. 

She stumbled to her feet again and took the gun from the desk. The metal in her hand felt heavy, real, and grounded her. A click sounded as she checked the clip before loading it full of bullets. She tucked the remaining box in her suit. Elvira walked through the door and headed down the hall, aiming carefully at the massive bugs that swarmed her in the hall. Her ears rang as she fired two shots off in the echoey, metallic halls of the vault. Swinging the gun down, she bashed the exoskeleton of the bugs in, stilling them forever. Foul smelling goo oozed from them and coated the vault suit where the bullet had splatted the fluid. 

Finally, after pushing through the halls, Elvira made her way to the semi familiar gear shaped door, approached the control panel, and looked around for a way to open it. She pressed all the buttons and fiddled with the dials and nothing. Panic began to build in her chest. This couldn’t be it. She took a step back, clutching her hands to her chest, panting as the panic settled. Another giant bug approached her, jumping at her. She shrieked, shooting at it, firing five rounds before it lay dead. She looked down to the corpse and notices the skeleton outstretched towards the panel.

A large, clunky, brown computer sat on the floor, over his arm bone. She lifted it and turned it around before putting it on her arm. The second she latched it, it booted up and started running it’s systems. She pulled a chord from it that looked like it matched the insert for the panel. She plugged it in and press the button, praying it worked. There was a crunching, grinding, searings sound metal on metal and the bridge to the exit extended towards her. The panic subsided and she approached the gate, stepping out towards the elevator that would take her back home. 

It didn’t feel like that long ago she had entered the vault but those bodies were skeletons and that took time, even with giant roaches to help get rid of the fleshy bits. When she got back home, would it even still be there or would someone have taken it apart to build something new? Would her abandoned photo albums and holotapes still be there or would they be ashes in the wind by now? Would anyone be there? Or would it just be her? 

The elevator brought her back to the surface and the light was blinding. She shielded her eyes, slowly adjusting to how bright everything was. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Was it always like this? A nuclear bombs effects weren’t really all that known until now, she supposed. Her feet carried her in the reverse of what she had dashed when the bombs dropped. 

To say she was surprised to see Codsworth standing in front of her shambling house would be the understatement of the year. He was still trimming the beautiful blooming flowers. They were different, most likely mutated by the intense radiation but they were blooming. That was encouraging. 

They spoke and the Mr. Handy lead Elvira towards one of her old neighbor’s houses. A group of settlers had set up shop there and were operating out of the garage and rebuilding the house into a franken-house with patches of metal of all different colors. A man in a cowboy hat and one in coveralls stand in the doorway, chatting. 

Elvira approached, stood up a little straighter and cleared her throat for their attention. “Excuse me. I seem to be a little… lost. You see, I used to live just over there,” She pointed politely towards her home, “But then the bombs dropped and I went into the vault that’s just up the road from here and, well, you can imagine my confusion to find out that I’ve been away for two hundred and ten years. I hope it isn’t too much to ask if you could point me in the right direction to get somewhere to catch up on what’s happened?” 

Both men stared at her in complete bewilderment. She was too cheery and too clean for the Commonwealth. That smile and pearly whites told enough of the truth that the man in the coveralls didn’t even need to recall his trip to the vault to know she wasn’t lying. He remembered seeing that face when he visited it. Those clean black lines around her eyes, that bold red lipstick, those high cheeks. She was definitely frozen in those pod things in the vault.  
“I thought you were dead, like the rest of those people in those pods,” the man in the coveralls muttered. He cleared his voice, “My name is Sturges. This is Preston. We work for the Minute Men.” 

“Well, what’s left. We’re rebuilding, like more things in the wastes.” Preston said

“Minute Men? Such an ancient name. Guess there is something to be said for traditional values. My name is Elvira.” El fiddled with her hands as she stood before the two men. It was hitting her how little she knew. It really was like stepping into a new dimension. Everything was so different. Even the air felt different. Her lungs burned breathing it in. 

“Come in and we’ll catch you up,” Preston set up gun down and pulled a third chair to the table visible by the door.


End file.
